First Battle of Italy
The First Battle of Italy was a long and grinding campaign, beginning in 2008 and lasting until the present day. The Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Law had in 2006 calculated that more Italians had their wires tapped than any other European country. The Prime Minister and his allies have been targeted by several taps, which attracted public ire when put in magazines and the like. This was what induced the law's proposition. Supporters said that courts authorized wiretapping too often, and that the media should not be privy to the results. The Prime Minister said in 2010 that legislation was needed to protect Italian citizens' privacy. Paragraph 29 The proposed bill would have empowered anyone who believes themselves to have been offended by the content of a publication or website, even if the content were true, to force publication of a reply, uneditable and uncommented, in the same place and with equal prominence of the related content, with no right of protest against the requested rewrite or any inaccuracies contained, within 48 hours and without any prior evaluation of the claim by a judge. In other words, if you say anythign about a politician they had the full right to lie and bullshit somethign as hard as they wanted and slap it up right next to your content. If after 48 hours the reply hadn't been published, the person requesting the reply may eventually appeal to a civil court which would assess the request and evaluate the disputed content. The sanction would be a fine between €9,500 and €12,000. In other words, you could be fined for a car's value for not accepting the lies of politicians. According to editors of the Italian Wikipedia: :"neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of Wikipedia's contents are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni" (Wiretapping Act). This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image." :"Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website. Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia would have the right for a statement ("correction") to be shown, unaltered, on the page, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources." Our Opinions and Ideas This is an INCREDIBLE affront to political transparency, and an affront to democracy itself. People have the right to say anything they like (short of shouting "I'm going to blow myself and others up" or similar sentiments in an airport or something) and if others find the truths offensive, well then too bad. The truth is the truth, if there was a legislative process for this where both parties have to pay court fees but neither gets moneyin return, now THAT would be worth implementing. No one wants to pay court fees without hope of any money back, so few would bother suing, and most that do sue care enough to bother. Rich people don't have the time to address every bit of slandering, so even they would not bother, not from lack of court money but from time. A law against wiretapping is good, but to include this paragraph... it's just another coverup at an attempt to censor or spam the internet. They want to put so much bullshit up that people will be unable to find the diamonds of truth in the mountain of shit, much as China's hired commenters are tasked to redirect discussion on politically sensitive topics or those deemed dangerous to given politicians. They want to make it impossible to commentate on any bad decisions they make. They want to dampen our shout-outs against the injustices they inflict upon us. They thought we could be misguided easily by a misleading bill name, they thought wrong.